The Iron Lady

Rival queens

One question that continued to fascinate the public about the phenomenon of a woman Prime Minister was how she got on with the Queen. The answer is that their relations were punctiliously correct, but there was little love lost on either side. As two women of very similar age – Mrs Thatcher was six months older – occupying parallel positions at the top of the social pyramid, one the head of government, the other head of state, they were bound to be in some sense rivals. Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to the Queen was ambivalent. On the one hand she had an almost mystical reverence for the institution of the monarchy: she always made sure that Christmas dinner was finished in time for everyone to sit down solemnly to watch the Queen’s broadcast. Yet at the same time she was trying to modernise the country and sweep away many of the values and practices which the monarchy perpetuated. She and Elizabeth had very little personally in common – though Denis and Prince Philip got on well. The Queen was said to dread her weekly audience with her Prime Minister because Mrs Thatcher was so stiff and formal. It was not, as some suggested, that Mrs Thatcher was too grand, rather that she displayed an exaggerated reverence. ‘Nobody would curtsey lower,’ one courtier confided;¹² and the Queen wondered ‘Why does she always sit on the edge of her seat?’¹³

If the Queen dreaded Mrs Thatcher coming to the Palace, however, Mrs Thatcher loathed having to go once a year to Balmoral. She had no interest in horses, dogs or country sports and regarded the outdoor life – long walks and picnics in all weathers – which the Royal Family enjoyed on holiday, as ‘purgatory’.¹⁴ Though she frequently told interviewers that she loved nothing better than a country walk, she never had any suitable shoes and had to be forced into borrowed Hush Puppies or green wellingtons.¹⁵ She could not wait to get away and on the last morning was up at six as usual, with her thank-you letter written, anxious to be off as soon as Denis was ready. The Queen was almost certainly equally glad to see her go.

More seriously, while Mrs Thatcher regarded having to attend the Queen as a waste of time – by contrast with every other engagement in her day, she would read the agenda only in the car on the way to the Palace – the Queen had real grounds for resenting Mrs Thatcher. First, she feared that the Government’s policies were wilfully exacerbating social divisions: she worried about high unemployment and was alarmed by the 1981 riots and the violence of the miners’ strike. Second, she was upset by Mrs Thatcher’s ill-concealed dislike of her beloved Commonwealth: she was disturbed by the whole South African sanctions controversy which regularly pitted Britain against all the other members, with embarrassing calls for Britain to be expelled. At the Commonwealth heads of government conference every other year, from Lusaka in 1979 onwards, the Queen worked hard to make herself the focus of unity while Mrs Thatcher often seemed bent on splitting the organisation apart.

The Queen also worried about defence cuts affecting the survival of cherished regiments with which she or other members of her family had connections: while Mrs Thatcher was concerned solely with military capability, Her Majesty was more interested in cap badges and mascots. She worried about Mrs Thatcher’s hostility to the Church of England, of which she was the Temporal Head, and about the effect of constant cost-cutting on other voluntary organisations of which she was patron. Sometimes Mrs Thatcher was obliged to defer to her. But she refused to allow the Queen to visit the European Parliament or – following her own triumphant visit – the Soviet Union. More than by any of these minor tussles, however, the Queen could not fail to be irritated by Mrs Thatcher’s increasingly regal style.

The impression that Mrs Thatcher was developing monarchical pretensions first gained currency when she took the salute at the forces’ victory parade through the City of London at the end of the Falklands war.Then the following January her visit to the islands was unmistakably a royal progress to accept the thanks and adoration of the population. Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote in the Observer that she was developing a parallel monarchy, becoming ‘a new style elective executive monarch, as distinct from the recessive ceremonial one.’¹⁶

From now on the trend only increased. Her foreign tours were more and more like the Queen’s, with all the trappings of crowds and walkabouts, little girls presenting bouquets, guards of honour and nineteen-gun salutes. As the Queen grew older and less glamorous – royal glamour being increasingly concentrated on the young Princess of Wales – Mrs Thatcher became more powerful and wreathed in myth, the very embodiment of Britannia. To the crowds who came out to see her, she far more than the Queen now embodied Britain.

She was also quicker off the mark than the Palace in visiting the scene of disasters. Whenever there was an accident or terrorist attack Mrs Thatcher always dropped everything to go at once – as her schedule allowed her to do: when the IRA bombed Harrods at Christmas 1983, for instance, she and Denis were attending a carol service at the Festival Hall, but immediately left at the interval. By contrast, Downing Street briefed, ‘the Royal Family couldn’t be relied on to go’ at all, and certainly not for several days.¹⁷

Mrs Thatcher was embarrassed by reports of differences with the Palace and did her best to play them down. Strongly though she supported the monarchy, however, both with loyal words and with public money, the indirect effect of Thatcherism during the 1980s was not kind to the Royal Family. On the one hand, the management of the royal finances – like those of other national institutions – came under closer scrutiny as the old deference waned: palaces, yachts, trains and retainers once taken for granted now had to be justified on a value- for-money basis. On the other, the media – led by the increasingly uninhibited Murdoch press – threw off all restraint in prying into the private lives and marriages of the younger members of the family. The 1990s was a difficult decade for the House of Windsor.

As Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher drew skilfully on a range of feminine roles – housewife, mother, nurse, headmistress – to project her message; but the longer she went on, the more she grew into the role of queen, which she could play so much better than the frumpy occupant of Buckingham Palace. The Falklands transformed the Iron Lady almost overnight into Boadicea, the warrior queen who had fought the Romans. Increasingly she came to identify with Elizabeth I – Gloriana – who had presided over England’s first great period of mercantile expansion and national assertion, surrounded by her court of flatterers and buccaneers, all eager to do her bidding and dependent on her favour. She encouraged the comparison by her susceptibility to handsome proteges like Cecil Parkinson, flatterers like Woodrow Wyatt, favourite businessmen like Lord King; and even adopted the chilling phrase, when one of her ministers displeased her, ‘Shall we withdraw our love?’¹⁸ In her memoirs she echoed Elizabeth by writing that ‘I did not believe I had to open windows into men’s souls.’¹⁹ And it was surely no accident that at the crisis of her premiership in November 1990 she appeared at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the City wearing a defiantly regal, high-collared Elizabethan dress, looking like Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love.

Above all she increasingly used the royal plural. In truth the widespread mockery she attracted for this habit is a bit unfair. In her early years she was criticised for the opposite habit of talking about the Government in the first person singular. ‘Unemployment is the most difficult problem that I face,’ she told Sue Lawley in 1981. ‘I do feel deeply concerned when I have people who want jobs and can’t get them. But I know that I can’t conjure them out of thin air.’²⁰ She even talked possessively about ‘my coal mines’²¹ and ‘my housing estates’.²² This language inevitably provoked allegations of personal rule. Nevertheless, when she was later criticised for using the plural she protested that she did so because she was ‘not an “I” person’:

I am not an ‘I did this in my Government’, ‘I did that’, ‘I did the other’ person. I have never been an ‘I’ person, so I talk about ‘we’ – the Government… It is not I who do things, it is we, the Government.²³

Sometimes, when she wanted to stress collective responsibility, this was true. At other times, however, she distanced herself from the Government and used the first person singular to give the impression that its failings had nothing to do with her. In fact she veered wildly between singular and plural, sometimes in the same sentence, as in her assurance to Sue Lawley that she cared about unemployment: ‘I wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.’²⁴ Her every waking thought was so taken up with the business of governing that she really made no distinction between herself as an individual and herself as leader of the Government, or more specifically the leader of the travelling circus which accompanied her.

Increasingly, however, she began to use the plural when she quite unambiguously meant herself alone. ‘We are in the fortunate position in Britain,’ she told an interviewer on her way to Moscow in 1987, ‘of being, as it were, the senior person in power.’²⁵ ‘When I first walked through that door,’ she declared in